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found poetry

I’ve been playing with “found poetry” lately and was very excited to find a swap that matched my interest. The swap’s official title was “Blackout Poetry Journal” and we were assigned two partners. Our task was to send each partner one found poem. The host is planning on doing more swaps so that everyone who participates over the course of time will end up with a journal full of exchanged found poetry pieces.

To begin you select a page from a book or magazine. Then you circle words that go together to make a poem. Once you’ve done that, you cover the rest of the words, either entirely (as the swap suggested) or partially, but enough that the rest of the text on the page fades away and you’re left with your poem.

I’m currently altering a book I’ve had for a long time (“Love Let Me Not Hunger” by Paul Gallagher) as an art journal (pictures to come). To prepare the book, I had to tear out about 1/3 of the pages so that the spine does not end up too stressed after the process of painting and altering are complete. So for my partners, I used pages that I had torn out. I swear I randomly selected these pages and when I was done with the poems, I realized that one happened to be about day, and the other about night. So for my partners, I made a color copy of each and then sent each partner an original and a copy of the page they didn’t receive. I used a black fine line permanent pen and a white pen as well as water-color pencils to highlight the poetry and “blackout” the text.